Duolingo’s owl mascot is alive after all. What did it gain from faking his death?

Call it a miracle, or a marketing ploy: Duo the owl is back from the dead.

Two weeks after announcing the murder of its sassy green mascot, the language-learning platform Duolingo now says he’s fine — and that he orchestrated the entire thing.

“Faking my death was the test and you all passed,” it captioned a video posted to social media on Monday, with a montage suggesting that users brought him back by completing their daily language lessons.

Duo — full name Duo Keyshauna Renee Lingo, born 1000 B.C., according to one official death announcement — has been the face of the company since its launch in 2011.

His extremely insistent — sometimes threateningly-so — lesson reminders and snarky social media presence have made him an online sensation in recent years, whether he’s hopping on the latest viral choreography, beefing with Duolingo’s legal team or pining after pop star Dua Lipa.

Duo’s intrigue reached entirely new heights earlier this month after the company announced his death on Feb. 11 and said authorities were investigating the cause.

“He probably died waiting for you to do your lesson, but what do we know,” it wrote.

It released a series of mournful and mysterious social media posts in the days that followed, including videos of Duo being fatally hit by a Tesla cybertruck and other Duolingo mascots giving him a funeral — and then them being killed off, too.

Then came the hopeful messages, encouraging users to complete daily lessons and quests in the app to “bring Duo back.” As fans — including dozens of companies and brands — paid tribute to Duo, many started to wonder if his death would end up being short-lived.

“Killing the owl off is a big move to get attention,” Matt Williams, a visiting clinical professor at the Mason School of Business at the College of William & Mary, told NPR earlier this month. “Smart money says he’s going to get resurrected in some way.”

The question was, how — and when — would that happen?

How Duo masterminded his death and resurrection 

On Feb. 17, the company directed users to a website called bringback.duolingo.com, showing a goal of 50 billion XP, or “experience points,” which users earn every time they complete a task in the app.

Exactly a week later, Duo returned.

It started with a video of his resurrection: Duo (or at least a person disguised as him) climbs out of the coffin in which he had been laid to rest just weeks earlier, hops out of a truck bed and walks down the street as if nothing has happened.

“Y’all really think i’d let a cybertruck take me out? #duolingohasrisen,” reads the caption.

The second video pairs flashes of animation with upbeat rap music. It appears to show Duo growing in an egg as users rack up XP points, then hatching with purple wings and celebrating alongside other revived characters.

The bring back Duolingo website shows that users around the world collectively earned 50,921,342,438 XP points. The U.S. brought in the most, 6.18 billion, followed by Germany, Brazil and China, according to a ranking on the website, which now reads: “Duo is saved!”

On Tuesday, Duo finally pulled back the curtain on his fake and untimely demise, in a video that opens with him unzipping and crawling out of his own coffin on a sunny beach.

“I’ve always had two main goals: get people to do their lesson and get Dua Lipa to notice me,” he says. “Neither was working. I had to do something drastic. So I thought, why not kill one green bird with two stones?”

The narrator explains that while he has accumulated many enemies over the years, he figured it would be easiest to frame a software engineer named Jimmy.

“Now I know the death video looked incredibly realistic, but it was all edited,” he admits. “The cybertruck was mainly there for dramatic effect, and perhaps some social commentary.”

He went on to say his friends — fellow Duolingo characters, which include several humans and a bear — were being asked too many questions and were “too nice to lie,” so he made them fake their deaths, too. He also admits to wanting to see “how many of you would bother to bring me back to life.”

The campaign was a success, he says, because it revealed “who the real ones were” and, “most importantly,” got Dua Lipa (who publicly mourned the owl) to notice him.

“I guess you could say I put the ‘fun’ in ‘funeral,’ ” he concludes, as the video shows him lounging on a beach chair with a drink in hand, and skipping carefree-ly across the sand. “So yeah, please just do your lesson. Because next time it won’t be a fake death.”

What did Duolingo gain from it? 

Social media reactions to Duo’s resurrection and confession were mixed. Many commenters cheered his return, while others wondered what it was all for.

Duolingo did not respond to NPR’s request for comment.

Williams — the former CEO of the Martin Agency, whose creations include the GEICO Gecko — told NPR earlier this month that a lot was riding on how the company chose to bring Duo back.

He warned that if the storyline felt too goofy, or inconsistent with Duo’s personality, it might alienate some fans — as was the case with Planters when it killed off Mr. Peanut only to reincarnate him as Baby Nut in a 2020 Super Bowl ad.

On Wednesday, after watching the saga play out, Williams told NPR he sees Duolingo’s campaign as a success.

“By using the Owl’s resurrection as an incentive for more users to do their lessons, Duolingo spiked engagement with their product (obviously an important business metric),” he told NPR over email. “And they did it in a way that’s completely consistent with the Owl’s character — after all, the Owl’s entire persona was about cajoling users to do their lessons. That’s a win for the business and the brand.”

Duo has answered some questions but also raised new ones.

For instance, Williams wonders where the story will go next, and how long Duolingo will be able to keep the momentum, especially given most peoples’ short attention spans. For now, who — as an owl might say — knows?